How Not To Make A Mockery Of Dandi

The Congress has turned gold into dust. By deigning to celebrate 75 years of the Dandi march alongside the democratic exertions in Goa and Jharkhand, it has drained one of Indiaâ€™s most potent political signs of its content.

The Salt Satyagraha, which the march ignited, showed it was possible for disparate people to be transformed into a modern and collective political agency on a pan-Indian scale.

Can the current Congress claim to see politics in terms other than of state power or have any place for a politically active civil society in its scheme of things?

Clearly, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, if she wishes her party to truly embody the political ethos of Dandi, canâ€™t afford to rest content with having flagged off one commemorative Dandi yatra.

She must effect a complete organisational revamp of the party, which is run today by a small coterie of leaders representing the interests of a dominant social elite. The partyâ€™s defunct, though, legendary cadre-based organisations, which represented the collective aspirations of a broad coalition of social forces, must be brought back to life.

Only then can the Congress expand the scope of its politics, beyond the trappings of state power, into the domain of civil society, and reclaim its lost moral authority. In short, it needs to invent a new politics by relearning the technique of forging a broad coalition of social forces in the fire of an authentic ideological programme.

The Salt Satyagraha was the point where various subaltern anti-colonial aspirations, expressed earlier in Champaran, Kheda and Bardoli, converged to articulate themselves as a unanimous impulse of national liberation. It exemplified the emergence of a consensus between sundry social groups through continuous dialogue.

Dandi encapsulates in practical terms Gandhiâ€™s theory of the political as a sphere not necessarily inside the stateâ€™s domain, which is capable of transforming society into a political agency for itself.

The Congress, in order to progress beyond its current political games, would do well to learn from its Gandhian past. Empty symbolism is guaranteed to take it a little beyond Dandi, into the Arabian Sea.